Monday, September 03, 2012

Bonnie Burnham, president of the World Monuments Fund, has weighed in on "Protecting Cultural Heritage: Lessons from the Syrian Conflict." Her words carry added weight because they are posted on the Huffington Post and thereby are reaching an audience magnitudes of order larger than any normally available to those of us who care about protecting cultural heritage in times of armed conflict. This is an all-too-rare opportunity not just to alert the public to the terrible damage being done in Syria (there have been a fair number of media reports already about the destruction), but to offer specific, pointed, and actionable policy proposals laying out things that could or should be done to minimize future damage, in Syria and other future conflicts.

Unfortunately, this is an opportunity missed. Though Burnham does offer three suggestions, they are vague and unrealistic proposals:

The international community must do more to address the issue of protecting cultural patrimony during conflicts. Plans should be in place before conflicts escalate. The more-than 100 countries that have ratified the Hague Convention should examine the possibilities of more strenuous enforcement. In the immediate aftermath of conflict, neutral bodies should sequester and protect cultural sites from further damage, as the U.S. Army's famous Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Unit did following World War II.

Let's take these one at a time.

"Plans should be in place before conflicts escalate."Agreed, but the passive voice leaves unclear just who should be making such contingency plans, and no indication is given of what such plans might or should include. That is all the more disappointing given that Burnham contributed a chapter to Antiquities Under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection after the Iraq War, a volume which includes a number of planning recommendations by a range of experts. And since that book came out, we have learned more, from the experiences of Libya (where shepherds were permitted to graze their flocks on World Heritage sites in exchange for keeping guard there) and Cairo (where Egyptians formed a human chain to protect their museum), about how local citizens might be encouraged or enlisted in advance to be prepared to come to the aid of their cultural heritage when the going gets rough.

That sort of direct action, of course, involves risks, and in Syria today it would probably be too dangerous for it to make sense to ask locals to put their lives on the line at many sites. Even in Syria, however, some sites far from any fighting are now at risk of looting and could have been protected had heritage officials in Syria, and foreign archaeologists who are now shut out from the country, managed to develop local networks to be called upon.

"The more-than 100 countries that have ratified the Hague Convention should examine the possibilities of more strenuous enforcement." That would be nice, since the enforcement mechanisms now attached to the Convention are, to put it mildly, weak. But enforcing Hague would be of little help in cases such as Libya, where the loophole of "military necessity" would get the Assad the regime off the hook for most of the damage it is doing, and where the rebels do not constitute a state (much less a state party to the Convention). The 1954 Hague Convention was designed to deal with the actions of armies battling each other on battlefields, not with irregular civil warfare conducted in the midst of population centers.What could dissuade or at least discourage both sides in Syria from fighting each other for control of militarily advantageous sites that also happen to be World Heritage sites? Changing the Convention to do away with the military necessity loophole will never happen. Short of that the only strategy that stands any chance of success would be one that calls upon specific states that are backing each side of the conflict to use their leverage to make clear to those they support that if evidence emerges that they were the first to move onto a protected site there will be a cost to be paid in terms of reduced military assistance (and vice versa). Of course, such evidence is very hard to come by and evaluate. What is needed, and what Burnham and other heritage advocates should be pushing hard for, is the development of new technologies capable of providing reliable and verifiable real-time monitoring of sites. This is an area where huge advances are easily imaginable -- for example, cellphone users in Syria could be enabled to upload images that would also automatically geocode information and that could then be collated to provide a crowd-sourced dossier. It would be great if the UN could take the lead on such a program, but the funding is lacking. If I were Burnham, I would get together a posse with other heritage protection advocates and make a pitch to Google and Getty for money for that sort of thing. "In the immediate aftermath of conflict, neutral bodies should sequester and protect cultural sites from further damage, as the U.S. Army's famous Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Unit did following World War II." This is one suggestion I endorse, though it would have little impact on the kinds of conflicts we are seeing now. Remember, the Monuments Men were part of a gigantic military operation that was pushing an occupier out and setting up its own occupation, not a neutral body, and they were able to protect sites from further military-related damage because they had the ear and support of military commanders. In principle, a UN-negotiated cease-fire might enable the carabinieri or other militarized cultural police to be dropped in, and developing a standing international force capable of joining in peacekeeping operations is an objective worth pursuing, especially because such a force might be able to do important work preventing looting by civilians (something else the 1954 Hague Convention did not anticipate becoming the major problem it is today). But this would have to be done very gingerly, since what counts as "neutral" to internationalists may appear very differently to nationalists, as we know from the fate of the carabinieri's heritage protection units, who were driven out of Iraq after a number of these brave souls were killed by insurgents.